Get the Latest on the NVMe Fabrics Over Fibre Channel

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Solutions Guide

It’s amazing to reflect on where Fibre Channel is today since the completion of the standard in 1994. From that time until now we have witnessed some amazing changes in the computing industry, no longer is there a single solution that fits all but continuous innovation has produced technologies and products that more accurately service the needs of a broad array of compute scenarios…

Just like the term suggests, a roadmap shows the story of a technology. It is a guide to where it has been, where it is, where it is going and when it is going to get there. The more accurate the roadmap, the more valuable it is to its three primary audiences: the IT user base that deploys the technology, the development, manufacturing and distribution base that supplies the technology, and the industry standards bodies that develop standards for the technology…

Storage has served as the core example of disruptive technologies in a paper by Prof. Clayton Christenson of Harvard Business School. Prof. Christenson practically invented the term “Disruptive Technologies” with his HBS paper “Disruptive Technologies, Catching the Wave” in 1995 using the disk storage drive industry as the prime example. The key metrics for the storage industry for the past two decades were 1) size of disk and 2) dollars per megabyte (MB)…

In early 2015, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced the completion of a collection of new INCITS T11 standards referred to as Gen6 Fibre Channel. As the name suggests, Gen6 points to the sixth generation on the Fibre Channel roadmap fundamentally defining the single lane speed of 32GFC…

Roadmap Illustration

Fibre Channel has a laser-focus on speed and continues to progress at a blistering pace. Fibre Channel is continually evolving to higher speeds to meet the high bandwidth needs of storage applications. When large blocks of data are moved between servers and storage, the performance of the application is directly dependent on how fast the data can fly. The storage industry has come to rely on Fibre Channel to deliver superior performance and reliability for mission-critical applications.

Fibre Channel is at the heart of the data center connecting servers to storage, and relied upon for the most strenuous workloads. For example, Fibre Channel is deployed in many high-end applications in financial and governmental institutions where reliability and scalability are paramount. Fibre Channel consistently delivers greater than “five 9s” or 99.999% uptime as measured by vendors and customers in data center deployments worldwide. Fibre Channel storage area networks are often completely redundant to ensure constant service and uncorrupted data without single points of failure.

Rupin Mohan, Director R&D, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Introduction Storage has served as the core example of disruptive technologies in a paper by Prof. Clayton Christenson of Harvard Business School. Prof. [...]